NY Times Sunday Book Review July 11, 2010
Hayek: The Back Story
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Last month, a funny thing happened on the way to the best-seller list. A
66-year-old treatise by a long-dead Austrian-born economist began flying
off the shelves, following an hourlong endorsement from a right-wing
television host better known for pumping political thrillers than for
rocking political theory.
The economist was Friedrich von Hayek, the book was The Road to
Serfdom and the host was Glenn Beck, who compared Hayeks book to a
Mike Tyson (in his prime) right hook to socialism in Western Europe and
in the United States. As it happens, The Road to Serfdom a classic
attack on government planning as an inevitable step toward
totalitarianism, published in 1944 and kept in print since then by the
University of Chicago Press had already begun a comeback of sorts. It
sold 27,000 copies in 2009, up from about 7,000 a year before the
inauguration of Barack Obama. But Becks endorsement catapulted the book
to No. 1 at Amazon.com, bringing a temporary end to at least one
tyranny, that of Stieg Larsson. Since the program was broadcast on June
8, 100,000 copies have been sold.
Thats an impressive number for an academic-press book, if a bit anemic
compared with the 1.2 million views for Fear the Boom and Bust, a
Hayek versus John Maynard Keynes rap video that went up on YouTube in
January. (Kickoff line: Party at the Fed!) But in fact The Road to
Serfdom has a long history of timely assists from the popular media.
When Hayek began formulating his ideas in the early 1930s, he was an
émigré professor at the London School of Economics, watching events in
both Europe and Britain with alarm. Like many others, Hayek was
frightened by the rise of Nazism. He interpreted it, however, in an
unorthodox way, not as the defeat of democratic socialism but as its
logical culmination. Hayek started writing the book after World War II
began, as a contribution to the war effort. Looking ahead, Hayek was
also worried about what would transpire if the Allies won, as Bruce
Caldwell puts it in his introduction to THE ROAD TO SERFDOM: Text and
Documents The Definitive Edition (University of Chicago, $17). In
ominously titled chapters like The Totalitarians in Our Midst and Why
the Worst Get on Top, Hayek laid out his case against socialists of
all parties who he believed were leading the Western democracies into
tyranny that mirrored the centrally planned societies of Germany and the
Soviet Union.
This theme, being taken up today by Beck and other antigovernment sorts,
had a plausible basis at the time. Caldwell quotes a 1942 Labour Party
pamphlet that declared, There must be no return to the unplanned
competitive world of the interwar years. . . . A planned society must
replace the old competitive system.
When it appeared in 1944, The Road to Serfdom received a courteous if
mixed reception in Britain (where paper shortages limited the print
run). Keynes, Hayeks friend and lifelong intellectual opponent, called
it a grand book, adding, Morally and philosophically, I find myself
in agreement with virtually the whole of it. George Orwell, more
equivocal, conceded that Hayek is probably right about the
totalitarian-minded nature of intellectuals but concluded that he
does not see, or will not admit, that a return to free competition
means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse . . . than
that of the state.
It was in the United States, however, that Hayek met with his greatest
success and the most intense hostility. Rejected by several trade
publishers, The Road to Serfdom was picked up by Chicago, which
scheduled a modest print run. It got a boost when Henry Hazlitt, a
prominent free-marketeer, assessing it on the cover of The New York
Times Book Review in September 1944, proclaimed it one of the most
important books of our generation, a call to all those who are sincere
democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen. The political
scientist Herman Finer, on the other hand, denounced it as the most
sinister offensive against democracy to emerge from a democratic country
for many years. But the most important response came from the staunchly
anti-Communist Readers Digest, which ran a condensed version of the
book in April 1945, with reprints available through the Book of the
Month Club for 5 cents each. The condensation sold more than a million
copies.
Reading the book today, its easy to see why Hayeks message caught on
with a public divided over the New Deal, struggling with the transition
from a regulated wartime economy and concerned about rising Soviet
power. But unlike some of his champions in 2010, Hayek didnt oppose all
forms of government intervention. The preservation of competition, he
wrote, is not incompatible with an extensive system of social services
so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such
a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields. This
qualification, however, was left out of a comic-book version of The
Road to Serfdom printed in Look magazine in 1945 (and distributed as a
pamphlet by General Motors), which showed well-intentioned regulation
giving way to more sinister forms of control. In an unsuccessful effort
to educate people to uniform views, one caption read, planners
establish a giant propaganda machine which coming dictator will find
handy.
While Hayek, who moved to the University of Chicago in 1950, built an
ardent following of admirers (including Milton Friedman), his fame
gradually waned. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1974 he was
largely forgotten by the public and marginalized within his profession.
In graduate programs in the early 1980s, the economist William Easterly
recalled recently on his blog, Hayek was seen as so far right that you
would be considered a nut to read him. (His sunny view of the Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet probably didnt help.)
Today, Hayek continues to inspire noisy ideological debate. In his
recent book Ill Fares the Land, a passionate defense of the democratic
socialist ideal, the historian Tony Judt writes that Hayek would have
been (justly) doomed to obscurity if not for the financial difficulty
experienced by the welfare state, which was exploited by conservatives
like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The economist Paul Samuelson,
in a reminiscence of Hayek published last December, was more dismissive
still. Where are their horror camps? he asked, referring to right-wing
bugaboos like Sweden, with its generous welfare spending. Almost 70
years after Hayek sounded his alarm, hindsight confirms how inaccurate
its innuendo about the future turned out to be.
Hayek also cropped up in the recent controversy over the Texas Board of
Educations new high school curriculum, which will now include him and
Friedman alongside Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Keynes. In a post on The
Timess Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers, a professor at the Wharton
School, noted that a search of scholarly literature found Hayek, with a
mere 1,745 references, lagging far behind Smith (25,626), Keynes
(4,945), Friedman (8,924) and even Lawrence Summers (2,064). The
message from the Texas Board of Education seems to be: If you cant win
in the marketplace of ideas, turn to government institutions to prop you
up, Wolfers wrote, adding sardonically, I dont think Hayek would
approve.
Another blogger, redoing Hayeks count, tallied 9,385 citations. But
intellectual legacies dont stand or fall on such bean-counting.
Besides, Hayek, whose later work on the self-organizing nature of
information has been influential far beyond economics, himself said The
Road to Serfdom was more a political book than an economic one.
But how relevant is the book to Glenn Becks America? In his 1960 essay
Why I Am Not a Conservative, Hayek observed, Conservatism may often
be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding
principles which can influence long-range developments. Then again, his
own strange road to best-sellerdom illustrates that a books reputation
can be determined not just by its contents but by the company it keeps.
Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.
--
Sandwichman
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